A Data-Centric Approach To Identifying 404 Pages Worth Saving

A critical part of doing a site or link audit is checking to see how many 404 (page not found) pages there are in a site. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen an audit that lists the total number of 404 pages and advises developers to find appropriate pages to redirect these 404 pages to.

That’s no big deal if we’re talking about just 20 to 30 pages. But, when a site has 404 pages in the thousands, and you tell the developers to fix these pages, you’re going to look more than a little ridiculous. So, how can you find out which of those 404 pages are actually important?

Two of the most important metrics to look at are backlinks to make sure you don’t lose the most valuable links and total landing page visits in your analytics software. You may have others, like looking at social metrics. Whatever you decide those metrics to be, you want to export them all from your tools du jour and wed them in Excel.

But, I think that approach is a bit shortsighted. I much prefer looking for all important landing pages, which you get to by navigating to Content > Site Content > Landing Pages.

To pull all of them, you need to look at the total number of landing pages in the bottom-right corner of the report (e.g., 1 – 10 of 441). If you have more than 5oo landing pages, you’ll need to use this trick to get them all.

Pull It All Together

Once you know that all of your URLs follow the same syntax (by either having them all start with http:// or removing the http:// from all of the URLs), you’re ready to stitch all of these metrics together using VLOOKUPs in Excel. If you’re new to VLOOKUPs, check out this introduction on the Microsoft site.

Make sure you format your dataset as a table so that you can sort the data by the number of landing page visits, backlinks, or page authority — or whatever else you want to pull into the dataset.

By taking this kind of data-centric approach, you can fairly easily identify the backlinks you actually need to address and fix.

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About The Author

I'm a Senior SEO at SEER Interactive, an Internet marketing agency in Philadelphia. My areas of focus are SEO, analytics, and data collection and analysis. My claim to fame is I make data sexy — and teach other marketers how to do the same.